Very technical beer.

Archiv für den Monat: Oktober 2015

We were in Göteborg and it was fantastic and you should make a note in your calendar for 4–7 October 2016 (or 6–9 September 2016—I’ve seen both, mark both, and we’ll ask Tycho) and a note for December, when, during your yearly review, you’ll tell your boss to put it in the budget.

For those who had to stay home here’s the Documentation. Ask Balz or Birgit or Max or Michael or Jean-Claude or Sebastian for their highlights. Or any of the other 240 attendees.

In early August I visited Bret Victor’s Communications Design Group research laboratory in San Francisco. Against the far wall of the lab’s library stood a 10-foot wooden bookshelf. It was stuffed with manuals on the history of computers and programming and interfaces, novels and countless non-fiction books.

From behind me, Bret said: ‘Watch this,’ and pointed a small green laser at one of the books. The spine – the physical spine – lit up and above the bookshelf the book itself exploded onto an empty swath of wall. The entirety of its contents, laid out page by page by some hidden projector. The laser tracked by some hidden constellation of cameras. In his hand, Bret held an iPad, and as he pointed the laser at various projected pages they appeared on his device. As he slid from page to page on the iPad, the corresponding pages on the wall enlarged. It was a way to view both the macro and micro of a book – the overarching structure of the whole and the minutiae of the paragraph.

I want this.

And then El Capitan (or, apparently, El Capitán) was released, though it was hard to get in Göteborg. I’m also not sure how I feel about an OS X release without John Siracusa’s review…